From the ‘truth is stranger than fiction department’, reporting from San Francisco at the AGU Fall Meeting
ED11D-02 Professional Ethics for Climate ScientistsMonday, December 15, 201408:15 AM – 08:30 AM Moscone South 102Several authors have warned that climate scientists sometimes exhibit a tendency to “err on the side of least drama” in reporting the risks associated with fossil fuel emissions. Scientists are often reluctant to comment on the implications of their work for public policy, despite the fact that because of their expertise they may be among those best placed to make recommendations about such matters as mitigation and preparedness. Scientists often have little or no training in ethics or philosophy, and consequently they may feel that they lack clear guidelines for balancing the imperative to avoid error against the need to speak out when it may be ethically required to do so. This dilemma becomes acute…

Democrats were thrilled when John Walsh of Montana was appointed to the United States Senate in February. A decorated veteran of the Iraq war and former adjutant general of his state’s National Guard, Mr. Walsh offered the Democratic Party something it frequently lacks: a seasoned military man.

On the campaign trail this year, Mr. Walsh, 53, has made his military service a main selling point. Still wearing his hair close-cropped, he notes he was targeted for killing by Iraqi militants and says his time in uniform informs his views on a range of issues.

But one of the highest-profile credentials of Mr. Walsh’s 33-year military career appears to have been improperly attained. An examination of the final paper required for Mr. Walsh’s master’s degree from the United States Army War College indicates the senator appropriated at least a quarter of his thesis on American Middle East policy from other authors’ works, with no attribution.

Mr. Walsh completed the paper, what the War College calls a “strategy research project,” to earn his degree in 2007, when he was 46. The sources of the material he presents as his own include academic papers, policy journal essays and books that are almost all available online.

Read the rest; it’s pretty damning stuff, as in wholesale cutting-and-pasting from publicly available think-tank reports. For example:

Mr. Walsh writes: “Democracy promoters need to engage as much as possible in a dialogue with a wide cross section of influential elites: mainstream academics, journalists, moderate Islamists, and members of the professional associations who play a political role in some Arab countries, rather than only the narrow world of westernized democracy and human rights advocates.”

The same exact sentence appears on the sixth page of a 2002 Carnegie paper written by four scholars at the research institute. In all, Mr. Walsh’s recommendations section runs to more than 800 words, nearly all of it taken verbatim from the Carnegie paper, without any footnote or reference to it.

As we used to say in school, “bus-TED!”

Naturally, the Democrats will immediately call on Senator Walsh to withdraw from the race, if not resign, so… Wait. I’m sorry, I’m mixing that up with what the Democrats would do if a Republican were the miscreant. In Walsh’s case, he fits right in with the party’s leaders.

Walsh is fighting to keep this seat for the Democrats against Republican challenger Rep. Steve Daines. Daines has been doing well in the polls, and this scandal isn’t likely to help Senator Walsh, but this is no time to get comfortable. You’ll find Steve Daines’ web site here. If you can, send him some money.

This is amusing. Researchers from the University of Munich and ST’s beloved Duke University conducted a joint study that examined a person’s willingness to lie, if he could profit from that lie. The subjects were Berliners who were asked to play a game in which they could win a small amount of money. Each person would roll a die and record the results: higher numbers meant you won more money. This is what they found:

Honest participants would be expected to roll ones, twos and threes as often as fours, fives and sixes. But that did not happen: the sheets handed in had a suspiciously large share of high numbers, suggesting many players had cheated.

After finishing the game, the players had to fill in a form that asked their age and the part of Germany where they had lived in different decades. The authors found that, on average, those who had East German roots cheated twice as much as those who had grown up in West Germany under capitalism. They also looked at how much time people had spent in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The longer the participants had been exposed to socialism, the greater the likelihood that they would claim improbable numbers of high rolls.

The article carefully points out that this disparity might also be due to the relative poverty of the old East Germany (and the region does continue to lag the rest of the country to this day), but, come on. A Socialist society, in which the State controls the money you’re allowed to make gives you every incentive to cheat, just as the incidence of tax cheating goes up here when tax rates rise beyond a certain point. These people are doing what the system encouraged them to do.

What makes this amusing is that it’s directly contrary to the Socialist claim of being able to “perfect’ society, culminating in the USSR’s “New Man.” Instead, it’s apparently the capitalist societies, with their bourgeois notions of personal accountability, limited government, free enterprise, the Rule of Law, and property rights that produce more honest citizens.

The bodies of thousands of aborted and miscarried babies were incinerated as clinical waste, with some even used to heat hospitals, an investigation has found.

Ten NHS trusts have admitted burning foetal remains alongside other rubbish while two others used the bodies in ‘waste-to-energy’ plants which generate power for heat.

Last night the Department of Health issued an instant ban on the practice which health minister Dr Dan Poulter branded ‘totally unacceptable.’

At least 15,500 foetal remains were incinerated by 27 NHS trusts over the last two years alone, Channel 4’s Dispatches discovered.

The programme, which will air tonight, found that parents who lose children in early pregnancy were often treated without compassion and were not consulted about what they wanted to happen to the remains.

It didn’t happen in every UK hospital –one was appalled to learn another had been shipping its fetal remains to the first hospital to be burned– but that something like this could happen at all is nauseating. And not just for the callous treatment of human remains, like a fiery version of Soylent Green, but the miserable treatment of the parents, too. Remember, an abortion may be performed for medical necessity, not just to get rid of an unwanted pregnancy. Shouldn’t the parents in at least these cases be treated with more respect and empathy?

There have been a number of horror stories coming out of the UK National Health Service involving poor care or downright abusive treatment of patients and their families, almost all of them traceable in their origin to the dynamics of a government-run healthcare system. Oxford bioethicists have even argued in favor of post-natal abortion(1), on the grounds that a newborn isn’t capable yet of attributing value to its own existence, and thus can’t feel the loss of it.

And now this, the new fires of Moloch.

Footnote:
(1) What most of us in the real world would call “infanticide” and “murder.”

The fight over how to define the new health law’s success is coming down to one question: Who counts as an Obamacare enrollee?

Health insurance plans only count subscribers as enrolled in a health plan once they’ve submited a payment. That is when the carrier sends out a member card and begins paying doctor bills.

When the Obama administration releases health law enrollment figures later this week, though, it will use a more expansive definition. It will count people who have purchased a plan as well as those who have a plan sitting in their online shopping cart but have not yet paid.

“In the data that will be released this week, ‘enrollment’ will measure people who have filled out an application and selected a qualified health plan in the marketplace,” said an administration official, who requested anonymity to frankly describe the methodology.

The disparity in the numbers is likely to further inflame the political fight over the Affordable Care Act. Each side could choose a number to make the case that the health law is making progress or failing miserably.

What Ezra Klein, the article’s author and an administration apologist, Sarah Kliff, the Post article’s author, isn’t saying is that the administration’s “methodology” is nothing more than obfuscation, a con meant to create a “he said, she said” game that distracts from Obamacare’s indisputably miserable enrollment numbers.

This is as if Amazon had counted every item placed in a wish list or shopping cart as an “item sold,” even if the purchase were never completed. Investors seeing the government’s explanation buried in the footnotes of a quarterly report would rightly scream for the directors’ heads. It is rank fraud meant to make a failure look less bad (there’s no way they can make it look good), though it isn’t surprising coming from the White House that brought us “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”

The willingness of the Obama administration to deceive the American people is just breathtaking. It really is “Chicago on the Potomac.”

UPDATE: For some reason, I had it stuck in my mind that Ezra Klein wrote the article. Now corrected.

A second employee at US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is suing Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano over claims his career was curtailed due to anti-male bias at the agency, The Post has learned.

Jason Mount alleges in court papers that he was denied 43 promotions because he’s a white male and that he took a lower-grade job because of “how serious the discrimination and retaliation had become.”

Mount, 37, filed suit on July 31, about two months after ICE official James Hayes Jr. sued Napolitano for $3 million for allegedly pushing him out of a top job in Washington, DC, to make way for Dora Schriro, later named New York City’s jails commissioner.

(…)

His DC federal court filing details dozens of incidents in which he was allegedly passed over for promotions despite being fully qualified.

The litany of allegations include Mount’s September 2010 application to fill an assistant-special-agent-in-charge, or ASAC, post with Homeland Security Investigations in Boston.

Despite receiving “a rating of 100 percent on the knowledge, skills and abilities rating factors for the position,” Mount says, he was never contacted “to take part in an interview or further selection activities.”

Instead, court papers say the job went to a woman who was one step lower than Mount on the federal civil-service pay scale.

In addition, the woman, Linda Hunt, hadn’t completed an 18-month tour of duty at HSI headquarters in Washington, which “is required to be considered for an ASAC position,” the suit says.

Because of “the severe and pervasive retaliation and discrimination,” Mount says, he “essentially committed career suicide” in December 2011 and asked for a reassignment, “stating that he would be willing to accept a downgrade” in rank and pay.

Once could be a disgruntled employee just looking for payback; twice makes that less likely and starts to indicate a pattern. What lends credibility to Mount’s claims, in my opinion, is his refusal and that of his attorney to talk to the press about the suit. Usually, I’d expect people making bogus claims to go find their nearest Gloria Allred clone and call a press conference, hoping to win in the court of public opinion and persuade the other side to settle out of court (or at least get TV appearances and a book deal), knowing their case is weak on the merits. This, on other hand, has the look of someone who wants to go before a jury.

We’ll see. It could be bogus, but my gut feeling is that this is a case of smoke indicating fire. Yet another reason to elect a new administration that can bring some adult supervision to the DHS “animal house.”

It’s nice to see that the women’s movement in this country, at least on the Left, has come so far that they now feel free to subject their male colleagues to the same frat-house disdain and abuse they and their forebears endured:

A blistering federal discrimination suit accuses agency honcho Janet Napolitano of turning the department into a female-run “frat house” where male staffers were banished to the bathrooms and routinely humiliated.

James Hayes Jr., who now is New York’s top Homeland Security cop, claims Napolitano filled top spots in Washington, D.C., with two of her gal pals who were bent on tormenting male employees.

The suit identified them as Dora Schriro, who is now running the city Department of Correction, and Suzanne Barr, the chief of staff for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Soon after Schriro and Barr were hired in January 2009, male staffers were treated like lapdogs, Hayes claims.

Barr “moved the entire contents of the offices of three employees, including name plates, computers and telephones, to the men’s bathroom at ICE headquarters,” the suit says.

Barr also stole a male staffer’s BlackBerry and fired off a message to his female supervisor indicating that he “had a crush on [her] and fantasized about her,” Hayes claims.

Sometimes, Barr took a more direct approach. In one case, she called a male colleague in his hotel room and screamed at him using sexually humiliating language, the suit says.

Hayes claims that after he reported the abuse to the Equal Employment Opportunity office, Napolitano launched a series of misconduct investigations against him.

And this is the mindset of people charged with the solemn responsibility of protecting us from another 9/11.

I feel more secure, don’t you?

Now, of course, we don’t know the truth of Mr. Hayes’ claims; he could just be an embittered ex-employee who’s just making stuff up for some reason. But it rings true. For some reason, and to put it bluntly, many on the Left lack maturity. Whether it’s vandalizing the White House or excusing people who poop on police cars — and now, it seems, workplace sexual harassment– time and again Our Betters on the Left (all bow) seem to think it’s okay for them to do things they would denounce as crimes against nature, were they committed by Republicans.

That’s not to say Republicans and conservatives don’t have their problem children, too. (John Ensign, anyone? Larry Craig?) But we, at least, usually police our own and send the offenders away. That’s because conservatives recognize that this behavior is juvenile, wrong, and unworthy of someone granted the public trust and the dignity of office.